Current implementations of the transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) network standard within wireless environments run with certain configurations of variables relating to the transmission control protocol (TCP) portion of the standard such as timeouts, window sizes, window scale, and the like. Optimization of such transmission control protocol variables, however, does little to benefit other protocols running on top of the Internet protocol (IP) layer, such as real-time transport protocol (RTP).
Moreover, wireless links often employ a maximum transmision unit (MTU) which is smaller than those employed for hard-wired or land line network connections since radio frequency (RF) transmission is lossy, more prone to corruption and dropouts. For example, wireless links typically employ a maximum transmission unit size of between about 128 and 300 bytes, while land line (Ethernet) networks employ an average maximum transmission unit size of about 1,500 bytes, and may employ a maximum transmission unit size of up to 8 kilobytes (KB). However, the maximum transmission unit size for data streams including a wireless link is usually set to the smaller size throughout the entire communications path.
A small maximum transmission unit or packet size implies lower effective end-to-end bandwidth utilization for the data stream. Smaller packets also tend to congest the network hosts and all intermediate routers, and the destination host incurs higher processor utilization to process (more numerous) smaller Internet protocol packets.
When implementations of the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) network standard, which are currently being incrementally deployed, become ubiquitous, intermediate nodes in a network will NOT perform fragmentation and re-assembly of large packets into smaller packets and vice versa. All hosts connected to such an IPv6 network will therefore be required to implement “path maximum transmission unit discovery” to identify (and employ) the maximum transmission unit size which the desired data stream path is capable of sustaining. For systems with a wireless link, this requirement will lead to lower effective bandwidth utilization and other problems as described above.
There is, therefore, a need in the art for a system of intelligent Internet protocol packet relay for data streams including a wireless link.